Women are less likely to be engineers, data shows. This Fresno mom is bucking the trend

While working on the bottling line for Tioga-Sequoia Brewing Company, Gabriella (Christi) Gonzalez couldn’t help but notice all the water wasted while cleaning out the tanks.

“It’s really a problem for the entire industry,” she said. “Once you use this water to clean everything, it’s gone. We can’t reuse it.”

Living in a state known for droughts, “that was kind of just always on my mind,” said Gonzalez, a 30-year-old Fresno City College student. “I feel like this is a fixable problem. I learned that even bigger breweries are attempting to find ways to help conserve water, but they’re even having a hard time figuring out solutions.”

Gonzalez no longer works bottling beer, but the experience set her down the path of becoming a chemical engineering major. This May, she graduated with a biology degree and will transfer to a university.

One day, she wants to solve the water waste problem for the craft brewing industry.

Fresno woman earns tops honors from NASA

So far, Gonzalez said, she’s “five for five.” She’s been admitted into every college she’s applied to — Cal Poly, CSU Long Beach, San Jose State, UC Riverside, and UC Irvine. She’s still awaiting results from her top picks of UC Berkeley and UCLA.

And in March, Gonzalez was one of 104 students in the country to participate in the NASA Community College Aerospace Scholars virtual experience. She collaborated with other students to design a mission to the moon.

Although she didn’t get to visit the NASA center in Houston due to the coronavirus pandemic, Gonzalez was project director of her 12-person team, which was selected as the top team. She was also named MVP by their NASA mentor.

She gained a lot of real-world experience, she said.

“I kind of always had this viewpoint of, if you’re an engineer and you go into the field, it’s kind of all on your shoulders,” she said. “It’s really not how it works. You’re working in a team of people from diverse backgrounds and specialties, and you’re really working together to create something.”

The scholars program is funded by NASA’s Minority Research and Education Project, which targets underrepresented populations to succeed in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics).

Recent Pew Research analysis has shown that although women make up a large majority of healthcare workers, they are still majorly underrepresented in other STEM fields such as physical sciences, computing, and engineering.

Only 15% of engineers and architects are women, for example. Women have seen the biggest gains working as atmospheric and space scientists. According to Pew, that percentage rose from 15% in 2016 to 24% in 2019.

Hispanic and Black populations are also less likely to earn degrees in STEM fields than in any other fields.

Although STEM degrees have exploded over the past decade, and STEM workers typically earn more than workers in other occupations, the field still suffers from a lack of diversity, according to the research.

The gap is especially prominent for Hispanic workers, who make up about 17% of the country’s workforce, but only 8% of all STEM workers.

Although Gonzalez credits the Central Valley’s diverse population to her being able to meet many people in school, she realizes that there are not a lot of women, especially in engineering.

That’s one reason she joined the Women in Engineering Club at Fresno City College.

“It was just a way for us to learn how to network, resume write, and we regularly have speakers of other women who are in the industry,” she said. “They tell us about how their path went, what they did, how they chose their fields, things like that.”

She said it’s important for students to join clubs and reach out to make connections. That’s how she’s found scholarship and other opportunities, such as the NASA experience.

“Especially minority students,” she said, “you might not have the connections that other people might have, or you might not have the information of what you should be doing.”

More diversity needed in STEM careers

One of the people that Gonzalez met while at Fresno City College was her instructor, Nell Papavasiliou, one of the three engineering instructors at Fresno City, all of whom are female.

Papavasiliou believes it’s paramount that the “designers of humanity” reflect the makeup of society.

“Engineers are involved in almost every aspect of your daily life,” she said. “When you turn on the lights at home, when you turn on the faucet. When you look at your smartphone. Engineers have been involved in creating those or designing those objects and designing those systems.”

“And if our makeup doesn’t reflect the makeup of humanity, then I think we’re missing out on opinions or preferences, and just knowledge that that diversity brings.”

She said mentoring might be able to help recruit more people from all walks of life.

“People tend to gravitate and feel accepted when there’s other people that look like them, are the same age as them, in the classroom,” she said. “So we do face a challenge that our engineering classroom is not as diverse as we would like it to be.”

“When you’re brainstorming, and everyone brings something unique from their background and an interesting perspective, those are very important as we solve problems for society, which is really what engineers do.”

She said she’s been able to teach students from many ethnic, gender, and socio-economic backgrounds while at Fresno City. She understands that another barrier to the STEM field is a lack of foundational preparation, which is essential in the sciences.

“It can be daunting,” she said. “We have folks from all over rural areas, and so perhaps the preparation and the educational opportunities that were available to some of our students are not equal.”

‘Dirty secret of engineering’

In some ways, Gonzalez feels as though she’s beating the odds. Her journey, although filled with accomplishment, has not been linear.

“I have been in and out of college for about 11 years,” she said. “I did not qualify for financial aid, (and) my parents were not able to help me that much financially. I would take like a semester off and save up as much money as I possibly can, and then go to school that next semester.”

Initially a nursing major, Gonzalez says she ended up dropped from the program after she gave birth to her now 5-year-old daughter.

“I gave birth to her on a Friday, and my finals were that Monday,” she said. “I failed my last final, and so I had to rethink entirely what I was going to do. I knew I wanted to get a college degree. I knew I liked chemistry.”

She said she also realized that she didn’t want to keep attending college on and off. So she made a plan with her fiancé to be able to finish her dream.

“It is a little overwhelming,” she said of her graduating. “It’s exciting. I feel like I’ve plugged away for so long, and it’s finally coming to fruition. I’m finally seeing the results of all the work that I’ve been putting in.”

She would tell women going into an underrepresented field one thing:

“The dirty secret of engineering, or really anything in the STEM field, is that it’s hard for everybody,” she said.

“There are going to be subjects you’re really good at, and there are going to be subjects you’re really bad at. Just because it’s hard doesn’t mean that you can’t do it. You absolutely can do it.”

The Education Lab is a local journalism initiative that highlights education issues critical to the advancement of the San Joaquin Valley. It is funded by donors. Read more from The Bee’s Education Lab on our website.

This story was originally published April 23, 2021 at 5:00 AM.